Designing your mobile app

Design can make or break the success of your school’s mobile app. 

Just because parents, staff, and students are a captive audience with no other app to turn to doesn't mean you can short-change design. While you do have this built-in hedge against your users quickly deleting your app after a frustrating experience – and who hasn't done that? – you still need to insist on a great design that both looks good and functions well.

Design is much more than looks and layout. If it’s designed poorly or has clunky navigation, your visitors will not come back. 

Read a review of the top 20 school mobile apps

Function drives design. Look and feel surely play large roles, but design manifests in not only looks, but usability and accessibility. As Steve Williams, co-founder of SchoolNow points out in his article on why design is so important in school web communications, “The more organized it is – the better designed it is – the more inviting it will remain, building confidence in your visitors that they’ll get the information they need when they visit.” Read Steve's article here.

The same holds true for school mobile apps, whose design needs to be fully integrated with a school's website and other digital communications.

A school mobile app should not stand alone. Whether talking about how it functions or from brand appearance, your app should be totally seamless with the balance of your communications.

Your school mobile app should play nicely with all the other applications required to operate a school or district. If there are connection issues that throw wrenches into your IT operations, frustrations emerge for everyone. It needs to accommodate future updates in devices and operating systems, in addition to other platforms operating within your school or district.

Brand consistency

When integrated smoothly with your other school communications, your app could soon become the most important branding tool. Think of it as the entry point to your school’s image. The look and feel that's established in your school communications branding guidelines should be incorporated into the school mobile app elements.

Familiar content organization

Out of the gate, the user experience from your app to your website needs to be approachable, not intimidating. Whether visiting your website or your mobile app, there should be a familiarity with and no disconnect to how they seek and view content. If their first experience with your app is a bad one, they most likely won’t come back.

Following the same general guidelines and principles of a well-designed school website, your app needs to help tell your school story using intuitive navigation that makes visitors want to return to it. 

Just like the commercial mobile apps that handle everything from sports wagering to food ordering, the success of your school mobile can and should be measured. Don't let your app lay dormant or unused, a common fate of many poorly designed mobile apps.

Number of downloads

Don't just build an app and assume parents will flock to it. Part of your pre-launch planning for your app should include using all your other digital communications tactics to gain higher adoption rates.

Ratings and reviews 

Encourage ratings and review from your parents. This can be accomplished quite easily within the app and on the App Store or Google Play. You can reate a link for users to provide feedback. 

Key metrics 

For a deeper dive into measuring the success of your mobile app, review the most common indicators: 

Promoting your school through words, pictures and videos is so important these days, and your mobile app should be set up to accommodate that.

Schools are embracing social media and using it to engage their school families and the community at large. While a majority of people have dedicated social media mobile apps on their phones, the benefit of a mobile app is to make it easier for users to access these accounts.

An important factor for a mobile app is its ability to recognize your type of phone and directly link to the actual social media app. (Many mobile apps will launch a browser instead of the mobile app.)

In a perfect world, you can promote your message from a single spot and it will be shared across channels. For example, imagine you need volunteers for a school carnival. You create a page on your website, broadcast a message, and everything can also be available on your mobile app. You can even include a form for parents to fill out directly on the mobile app.

Photos and videos are great ways to spread the word for engagement. Video consumption on mobile devices is way up and will continue to soar. If photos and videos are or will be part of your school’s communication, make sure they work on your mobile app.

Like the calendar, a school directory is a very popular spot for you visitors, and yours should allow you to quickly search for an individual and click a phone number or an email button to automatically reach that person. (Again, with targeted content integration, the contacts that are relevant to the specific mobile app user will appear, rather than unrelated faculty and staff.)

Your directory should be easy for not only your parents and others searching for contact info, but for the content managers. Contact information should pull from your school’s centralized data. When faculty or staff contact info changes, many apps require you to upload a CSV file. Look for an app that integrates the directory with your school system to avoid that hassle and keep your data up to date and accurate.

One of the most frequently accessed areas of a website is the forms section. These important forms should also be readily accessible for your mobile app users as well.

Permission forms for field trips, transportation, model release, opt-ins, and opt-outs are convenient when they can be found with just a few clicks on a school mobile app. 

There are two major categories of permission slips: blanket and informed consent, with the former providing more protection for the school and teachers. Be sure to contact your school attorney when making your forms and making them available on your school mobile app.